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AIM listed director lifestyle (sorry oil services) company Vialogy (LSE:VIY) has – as predicted many times by me ended its Autumn ramp campaign of spurious announcements with a placing. The whole thing stinks and it merely delays the ultimate demise of this POS. The company has raised £1.4 million at 1.25p with punters each getting one warrant at 1.25p for every three shares subscribed for. Now here is why it stinks and why you should sell first thing on Monday morning.
Firstly I ask with whom the shares were placed? The company says: “with existing and new institutional investors.”. Yeah right. Placing stock at such a whopping discount (the shares are 1.625p in the middle but were 1.75p a couple of days ago) means that a good slug ( if not nearly all) has gone to bucket shops that will simply flip them onto retail clients making a turn. I invite Vialogy to name exactly which “institutions” took this stock.
Secondly, what will the money be used for? Vialogy says: “The net proceeds of the Placing will be used to strengthen the balance sheet and provide additional working capital to support ViaLogy’s strategy.” Note net proceeds. After commissions etc we are talking c£1.33 million. The money will be used to stop this company going bust ( for a while).
As I have explained before on numerous occasions (here for example) this company would have been out of cash entirely by March 31st (if it cleared its trade payables). This placing took place against a background of a company within six weeks of going bust.. You will remember the auditors warning of that possibility in the interims sneaked out on New Year’s Eve – see here.
So where does this leave Vialogy? At a trading level it now has another £1.33 million to piss away ( plausibly more if the stock can be pumped up enough to allow folks to exercise warrants and flip. But this company burned almost £1.2 million in the first half with costs rising by more than revenues. I do not believe that, despite all the bluster about big name contracts, that this cashburn is going to shrink by much any time soon. And so there will need to be another fund raise before the summer is out.
This is a company that has never delivered on its stated goals after many years. The board has trousered huge pay packets and the chairman is a proven liar. Throughout the autumn I got unmitigated grief from followers of this worthless entity (still capitalised at c£17 million) for pointing out how these shares were being ramped ahead of a placing. They should have sold at 2p plus as I advised them to do rather than posting moronic abuse of me on Bulletin Boards.
In a spirit of magnanimity I say to the Vialogy fan club that it is still not too late to sell ahead of the NEXT deeply discounted placing. My target price remains 0.1p.
Tom Winnifrith writes for 10 UK and US websites. All of his content is available via his own website www.TomWinnifrith.com and you can follow him on twitter @tomwinnifrith
You can get a free bi-weekly newsletter from Tom Winnifrith packed with opinion, comment, links to all his articles and a free share tip in the midweek issue by registering HERE – the weekend issue will go out on Sunday Morning.
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Andy, perhaps those words spring to your mind because you are a boring, unintelligent person who can barely think in unoriginal and irrelevant cliches.
Proven liar is Tom himself – stated a statitistic from his t1ps performance that was totally misleading and he calls other liars! Pot and kettle indeed.
“winners outnumbered losers by more than 2.5 to one”. No it was by 1.3 to one you lying-TW@!
Vialogy just isn’t playing ball is it Tom. Not sunk to expected levels and got a placing away. I’d expect some news and a rising share price going forward with egg all over Tom’s shriveled credentials and no doubt more lies, excuses and performance manipulation!
VIY is a nothing more than a typical AIM bag of shite outfit that persistently promises jam tomorrow. Whether you like Tom W or not… it doesnt take a frikkin genius to see VIY is run for the sole benefit of directors. To all those that are cheering VIY… have a bloody look at its history since floatation, over 10 years ago. Number of shares in issue was around 200m…. number of shares in issue now over 1 BILLION…. in that 10 year history… they have accumulated over £30 m of losses. Now to the idiots who think VIY is an investment…. ask yourselves exactly what VIY has delivered in those 10 years ? It’s been one big gravy train for the directors…. it’s as simple as that.
More utter shite from Tom!
Vialogy have 2 super majors on board amongst other national oil companies, and have just raised 1.4 million pounds.
If Vialogy are so bad why the intrest Tonm? Helping fellow followets of yours ??? Or after more shares in the hope of getting them cheaper?.
Why pay Tom to listen to his misleading tips… According to him Vialogy were going bust!
Hold on we just raised 1.4million pounds.
Not bad for a company going bust with no prospects!
Breaking the oil industry takes time… Vialogy have disruptive technology better than anything else available to date FACT.
Once this is fully automated the 1 billion shares in issue will be irrelevan.
This is a billion pound company in the making…for all the Directors short comingsyou can not stop progress.
World resources are running out Vialogy can help find them better than anyone else.
With a current market cap of just 17million you do the maths!
I think TW has had a point in recent years and this is why I have been happy to sit on the sidelines since 2007, when I locked in a very healthy profit. However, the board broadened the church and I did indeed buy back in with this placing. Only time will tell if mine was the clever or the stupid money. Nobody is expecting profits anytime soon but if we see £2m of revenues in 2013 then the board have improved their credibility. Clearly high risk high reward and only for those that can afford to lose the lot if TW proves to be correct.
there we go someone who bought in with the placing and a new investor.
broker man Dan is almost as blinkered and blind as the TW@ with analysis firmly in the rear view mirror and discounting very real progress.
Try asking yourself why Tom Winnifrith (TW@) was forced, yes forced, to remove his t1ps claim in all advertising that winners outnumbered losers by more than 2.5 to one? It was because he was found out to be lying!! He is infact not very good at what he does and after costs the real ratio was close to 1 to one! No wonder he felt the need to lie.
or perhaps……..
here is a comment below made by Rivington’s chairman in the chairman’s statement, May 2012 as Tom was, shall we say ‘on his way out’ for a pizza at his Real man pizza company. It seems Tom can turn his hand to almost anything. It’s just making it a success that elludes him.
Anyone wanting to sign up for the latest Nifty Fifty venture where you can all marvel as he picks nearly 50% losers and lies about it. LOL
— T1ps Fund Management: adverse fund performance lead to diminished fee income;
— Real Man Pizza Company: the restaurant venture was misguided, and continued to generate monthly losses;
http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2012-05-29/aCJ9h7SnTWKg.html
I’m taking the opposite view as Tom. It’s of great credit to the Vialogy management that they’ve kept the company going, especially through all this barrage of internet abuse. Quite clearly the company has something of great value to offer or it would have been well gone by now. The large customers are playing a canny game and surely know the true worth of QRD & may even be frustrated that Viaolgy have the ability to stick around. Sooner or later something has to give. Viaolgy’s sheer determination to see this through, will win the day. One massive global contract with financial details is all it will take to alter peoples view & Tom Winnifrith will be left out to hang.
There seems to be a big fanclub of private investors for VIY but why? I am sure not one of them could explain what VIY are trying to sell. Didn’t a famous investor get rich with a motto – don’t buy what you don’t understand.
I work for a multinational who should be a target customer for VIY’s yet has anyone heard of them? I have a colleague two doors down from my office who did say he once saw a presentation from a slick salesman using big words. This colleague has a Phd in Geophysics and has published dozens of papers at industry conferences. Does he understand what VIY are selling? nope. Where are the VIY papers? Where is their industry credibility and presence?
How do PI’s have such blind faith in something that no one can understand (including the CEO of the company)
I am not an investor, I have no financial interest long or short in VIY but come on investors, if this product worked do you think the company would be in the public domain and not swallowed by one of the Oil Service providers (Schlumberger, CGG etc). A working product would be a far more effective way for the Directors to get rich, but they don’t have a working product so they milk the fanatical investors instead.
A technology so good that after nearly a decade no big contracts have been signed and no revenues are coming in. Constant hints of big contracts sometime soon. Jam tomorrow, jam tomorrow, jam tomorrow.
Amazing to watch how a BOD is able to sustain PI’s loyalty despite years of slumping share prices, non existent revenues and the ever present failure of any actual contracts to be signed.
A remarkable lesson in the psychology of wilful delusion.
Putszy and CH Ingoldby, normally I would run a mile when a share has such PI interest. Combine that with a move into fashionable sectors like shale gas and it is easy to be cynical. However, I have been following the company in its different forms over a decade and now feel there is potential. Trading at a multi year low also means that there is less ” hot money” in the share price right now. If this returns in 2013, are you really going to bet against an opportunity to sell at 2.5p or 3.75p to double or treble your money?
Deep value, I can see no reason whatsoever for the share price to ‘double or treble’ but I can see lots of reasons for it to continue to slump.
I don’t know why you think it is at last showing any kind of potential but if you really are putting any of your money in this car crash of a company then I hope you manage to get it out without getting your fingers burnt.
As Putszy says…
It’s all about ‘understanding’ what the company does.
Apart from deep value no-one associated
with this conversation does.
chevvy Ron – I freely admit to having no understanding about what this company does. But there is the catch, I attend 1/2 dozen industry conferences a year and I have never seen a presentation or papers from these guys. Are they even trying to educate the industry as to what they do?
I don’t invest in AIM companies, way too risky for my liking, I ended up reading this article just by googling Directors of Vialogy trying to understand what they were about. The guy who wrote this – TW – may for investing advice be a t^at but he comes to a valid conclusion about VIY.
In my opinion this company won’t sell squat until they have the respect of Geophysicists who by their scientific nature want to understand how something works before they go and commit to buying something.
just my opinion. its your money to invest how you want Ralph.
TW here. I started saying sell VIY at 2.25p. I warned that a pre placing ramp was underway I was labelled a tw@t
Not to labour a point …those doing the labelling were wrong & I was right.
Tom
putszy said… “if this product worked do you think the company would be in the public domain and not swallowed by one of the Oil Service providers (Schlumberger, CGG etc)”
Vialogy demonstrated QRD to CGG on a North Sea project.
Were CGG impressed? Well, they were impressed enough to enter into a ‘business & technical collaboration’ with Vialogy so we can assume CGG don’t see Vialogy going bust anytime in the forseeable future.
Tw@ has gone ominously quiet. lmfao